toppa 3

I can't copy this properly because the Sands and McDougall 1944-5 online is 'unstable' but this is part of an ad for Amalgamated Dairies at 155 Capel which must be shortly before the time that Toppa ice cream was being made there. I don't know if Amalgamated became Toppa or Toppa bought the premises and converted it into an ice cream factory. The last mention of Amalgamated in the Age is August 1950. 

Here's another ad from approx the same time:

Melbourne Age 19 March 1943 p. 2

The above is from the Brisbane Telegraph 2 July 1953, p. 23. It doesn't tell us much but it doesn't negate anything we already know. Then there's this, from the Hobart Mercury 3 April 1954 p. 38:

Below is an ad from 1954, wherein the premises now houses a sinister-sounding org called 'Business Investments' and is selling off Amalgamated Dairies-adjacent (or perhaps some other similar company recently bought-adjacent) properties:

Melbourne Age 5 June 1954 p. 21

 Similar situation from May the same year:

Melbourne Age 27 May 1954 p. 20

Another ad, from 8 April 1954 p. 11 says that Business Investments is 'a subsidiary of Toppa Holdings'. Business Investments Pty Ltd - find me a more generic name - has fewer than twenty ads in the Age in the 1950s, and seems to have existed only to sell milk bars, which were surely owned by Amalgamated Dairies at an earlier stage and which needed jettisoning as the business switched, which seems to suggest (I'm talking myself round here) that yes, Amalgamated Dairies either converted to Toppa, or was bought by Toppa and its component parts sold off. I'd need to know more about the history of dairy distribution in Melbourne in the immediate postwar period I guess. But we are way before the period of dairy consolidation in the city - that didn't take place until, I think, the 80s. Those times when you'd go to another suburb and they'd have completely different packaging on their milk cartons! We were provincial AF back then...

Here's a banal news item from the Argus of 19 November 1955 (p. 18):

So this morning Perry and I went to have a look at 155 Capel St. We got very confused about where it was as it no longer seems to exist as an address, let alone as a building. These are 141 and 151, and a bit of associated laneway buildings etc. 

By the way this (above) appears to be a cool hidden cafe which I will have to check out properly sometime. 

I was confused about this but I think I've figured it. This is the site in 1945. It's pretty hard to see anything in this picture aside from that the big white shape represents one consolidated site. 

This is the same site on google maps now. So I guess what was Amalgamated Dairies/Toppa in the 1950s is now St Joseph's Flexible Learning Centre, which I didn't photograph when I was there because it's a school with kids in it. 

I suppose that's about the end of the mystery for now. In the sense of, that's as far as my research can go. The mystery may continue. In fact it does. But it's kind of a concocted mystery, and at present I feel like I'm having a discussion with myself about something no-one else cares about. What I do know is that if you put posts like this up online, at some point someone comes along who knows more. If that's you, please comment. If you want to discuss with me but you don't want to actually be published, you should still comment but with contact details and I won't publish the comment but I will get back to you. 

toppa 2

 

So being on strike and therefore not working I slipped into the PROV this afternoon and looked at everything they had relating to Toppa. There was virtually nothing and what there was, was not enlightening I am sorry to say. The main things, apart from that slender accounts report from the 40s above (the most interesting aspect of which was that their factory at this time was in Capel St, North Melbourne, and I use the term 'interesting' not advisedly but actually falsely), was some hard-to-follow court documents where various people had sued (loosely speaking) Toppa for injuries they'd incurred while working for the company. 

Aside from a few things like this (there was also a case of a portable scaffold that fell down), there's another court case where Peters Ice Cream claims that the Toppa people didn't give back a freezer cabinet. There must be more to this than meets the eye. But I don't really get it. 

So I wish I could tell you more about Toppa but at the moment that's all I have, and it's nothing. 

toppa the world

You might remember in 2006 I reminisced about how fond my feelings were towards the Toppa Ice Cream company. Perhaps my affection is linked to the fact that, as of 1966, the company was owned by British Tobacco - might also explain why I still get a slight yearn when I smell cigarette smoke (I've never smoked). What I don't really understand is why, when that company was doing such great guns in 1966 when (according to the Bulletin, anyway, which I suppose might have had some rationale to promote something that wasn't as hot as it seemed, though surely the Bulletin wanted cred) 'several... firms would welcome the Toppa fold under their wings', it basically disappeared in the early 70s.*  One of the things Toppa did in the mid-60s was move its factory from Brunswick to Preston...

Melbourne Age 12 May 1971 

and then wait five years to sell the old one, or something. That space is now, I gather, occupied by these townhouses, although there might have been something else in-between:

This is where they were at in 1970, looking for a mature man. Perhaps immaturity was a problem they faced? Hard to tell. Branching into diary products might have been a mistake as well. 

Toppa disappears from the pages of the Age in the mid-70s, and I gather at some point in there they were bought by Paul's, who always pissed me off because I assumed they were named in response to Peters, which didn't seem fair. But there was a two-hour moment in early 1972 when Toppa really got into the groove:

The Age 16 December 1971

How rad would that be? Yeah, I reckon they used words like 'rad' then. 

Anyway, if I can think of any other avenues to find out what happened to Toppa I will go down those avenues, though possibly what happened to them is they were bought by another company which shut them down, that's the end. 

* 'Expansion in the food industry' The Bulletin 8 January 1966 pp. 48-49

amscol

My family and I went to Adelaide in the summer of '73. I was entranced by two things: an apparent plethora of 50c pieces (I don't mean people were giving them to me, but that there just seemed to be a lot more of them around. My father must have commented on it or something) and the existence of another brand of icecream aside from (or instead of?) those I knew, Streets, Peters, Pauls (? did that exist yet?) and Toppa (the late, lamented). Yes it was AMSCOL. This ad was in the Loxton historical village, being all historical. I wonder if that makes me more historical than I thought.

my favourite icecream

Last night I was re-reading David Collier's book Just the Facts which is one of my favourite comic books (eg as in book compilations of comics). Collier has a few good things to say about nostalgia eg when he parodies Chris Ware's (what Collier sees as) uncritical nostalgia by making him star of a strip where, by aid of a time machine, Ware is sent back to the 1920s and goes around collecting everything he sees forever, and is of course unable to throw anything away.

I have a strong sentimental feeling about the Toppa icecream company (pic is the Toppa display at the Melbourne Show in 1954 - I'm not in it) I suppose because it was a whole culture (as much as I understood culture in 1970) that disappeared apparently overnight. I have a nostalgic feeling for all kinds of no-longer-available icecreams actually, presumably because that's one thing I absolutely know without a doubt I will never experience again, unless I get that special dementia Oliver Sacks wrote about.